Can you guys IMAGINE what invitations to play Gang Rape would be like?
 
 Holy crap, I would imagine some hilarity....

Quote from: Reckall;351543In all these instances you can find people pointing screaming to the former "recreative experience" as the culprit that turned the poor guy into a death-dealing sociopath. Sane opinion, as of 2009, is that the poor guy was probably a sociopath all along - pointing to the latest FPS/RPG/whatever session being only an easy scapegoat for denying the responsibilities both of the family and the society he grew up in.

I don't think Gang Rape might cause people to actually commit gang rape. That scenario strikes me as unlikely to say the least. (I mean, come on guys - how many women do you know who would agree to participate in this game as a victim with all the other players being men who she doesn't know? In a place where there are no witnesses? In what world does that happen? And in what world are men who LARP not the meekest, mildest and least-likely-to-commit-rape men who ever existed?) Gang rape the game is reprehensibly moronic and preposterous and in that sense, yes, it is reprehensible. But this moral panic is a step too far.

Quote from: noisms;351564I don't think Gang Rape might cause people to actually commit gang rape. That scenario strikes me as unlikely to say the least. (I mean, come on guys - how many women do you know who would agree to participate in this game as a victim with all the other players being men who she doesn't know? In a place where there are no witnesses? In what world does that happen? And in what world are men who LARP not the meekest, mildest and least-likely-to-commit-rape men who ever existed?) Gang rape the game is reprehensibly moronic and preposterous and in that sense, yes, it is reprehensible. But this moral panic is a step too far.

 You have too much faith in your fellow human. Don't assume everybody has common sense.

What the fuck is Reckall on about? I just said he was a cocksmock for defending the game, and he started rabbitting on about being silenced and told to go elsewhere, and some actor portraying Hitler in a movie. None of which had been mentioned by anyone.

What the fuck?

This is the problem with the internet. You can't just have a conversation with a person, they don't reply to you, they reply to the last twenty people they spoke to on a vaguely related topic, and drag all this other bullshit in you never said.

Read the fucking post and respond to it and it alone, how hard is that? Drongo.

Quote from: shalvayez;351565You have too much faith in your fellow human. Don't assume everybody has common sense.

People who have common sense won't be playing Gang Rape the game, by definition, so that point's moot. But I can't imagine even the ditziest woman putting herself in the position of playing a LARP entitled "Gang Rape" with a group otherwise entirely composed of men. In a place with no witnesses. Without telling anyone.

(To be frank, I can't imagine any woman wanting to play said LARP in any event, except perhaps for shits and giggles. Something tells me it wasn't written with women in mind - it rather seems like one of those things that a certain breed of hyper-liberal emo boy does in order to handwring about how awful his own sex is and gain insight into male dominance of women or some rubbish like that.)

Quote from: noisms;351598People who have common sense won't be playing Gang Rape the game, by definition, so that point's moot. But I can't imagine even the ditziest woman putting herself in the position of playing a LARP entitled "Gang Rape" with a group otherwise entirely composed of men. In a place with no witnesses. Without telling anyone.

(To be frank, I can't imagine any woman wanting to play said LARP in any event, except perhaps for shits and giggles. Something tells me it wasn't written with women in mind - it rather seems like one of those things that a certain breed of hyper-liberal emo boy does in order to handwring about how awful his own sex is and gain insight into male dominance of women or some rubbish like that.)

Emo: new scapegoat for a new millennium.

But emos enjoy being scapegoats!

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;351603But emos enjoy being scapegoats!

 By your understanding of their subculture, they do. Of course then again, I understand the Greek/Frat/Sorority culture to be WAY more into rape then Emo culture to be.

Quote from: shalvayez;351602Emo: new scapegoat for a new millennium.

I'm kind of defending emo inasmuch as I'm arguing that people who like it are probably much less likely to be rapists than the average.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;351579What the fuck is Reckall on about? I just said he was a cocksmock for defending the game, and he started rabbitting on about being silenced and told to go elsewhere, and some actor portraying Hitler in a movie. None of which had been mentioned by anyone.

What the fuck?

This is the problem with the internet. You can't just have a conversation with a person, they don't reply to you, they reply to the last twenty people they spoke to on a vaguely related topic, and drag all this other bullshit in you never said.

Read the fucking post and respond to it and it alone, how hard is that? Drongo.

No shit.

I think people get this notion that we censor or something over here because their shitty conclusions don't survive in the marketplace of ideas.  Which of course, can't possibly be due to the fact that their ideas are simply shitty and poorly thought out.  It has to be because theRPGsite is censoring.  Or we hate n00bs.  Or we can't handle the truth!

Whether it is ideas, money, or product, do you know who hates competing in the free market the most?  Vehement advocates of the Free Market.

Quote from: One Horse Town;351551??  

No answer, old boy.

Just to give an example of the depth of thought shown by OHT in this thread, a glance at my "location" shows in which timezone I live in, while a simple search on Wikipedia would have shown how Italians go to sleep like people do in all the rest of the world.

There, it was not difficult.

David: I started talking about Freedom of Speech and Thought when, in this thread, those playing the game were explicitly lumped up with "holocaust deniers, gang rapists and animal torturers" - and then spoken about like if they actually did these things.

Personally, I was bothered to discover that the "incriminating document" was a private possession leaked without the owner consent. This allowed to a lot of people to jump on some moral high horse after doing something that could very well be illegal. The aforementioned reasons ("calling out neo-Hitlers etc.") were put forward as a justification for the act. I simply pointed out how (and why) there is nothing illegal in what those who practice "Gang Rape" do. Whereas a copyright violation or an invasion of privacy could very well be.

Does this mean that I defend the game or that I like it? No, as I explicitly wrote (and it is telling how many people are still confusing the two issues in this thread). Does this mean that some abhorrent phenomenon should be let off the hook of criticism? Not at all. As we saw, there are already social mechanisms at work that do that. However, these mechanisms should work at the level of the society where the phenomenon is diffused. In the case of a private and legal activity, only those invited to take part in it should be entitled to express their criticism (even if only because - you know - they experienced the thing). Even in my criticism of the game I limited myself to what I could objectively experience: the explicit analogies made in writing between gang rape and a traditional way to be the GM in an RPG.

Either that, or those screaming against D&D "being a tool of Satan" because they open a book and read about "demon summoning" (maybe an incubus, there) would be right in an absolute sense. Because, you know, the book says so, so it is real and done by people who want to do it for real. And I think that we all share the same opinion about these kinds of judgements.

Kyle: Please, bear with me for a while.

As I wrote, I came here after a month-long battle against some forgite fundamentalists who wanted to "better the world" by explaining to everyone else how things should be done, how they should think, and why. Like: defining GMs as tyrants who dominate theirs subject creative freedom and the like. I actually found some solace in reading the " OK, I almost hate to ask this..." thread, since it made me feel... let's say "less lonely" (beside allowing me to discover some more moronisms spewed by Edwards & co.)

However, at the end of the day, I discard the forgite "explanations" about why what I do is wrong, and evil, and corrupting for young psyches for the same reasons why, in the past, I discarded "D&D as Satanism" and "D&D as an highway to financial ruin by gambling!" (I'm not making this up). Other people intruding in your personal freedom justifying the act as being done in the name of "an higher good" - an higher good as defined by them, of course.

However, by the very same principle, I won't never, ever, tell a forgite or to anybody else how he should play, why the way he plays is wrong and damaging, or even question his personal gaming experiences and how them led him to seek a different way of playing. For what I care they can play their games, publish them and even pimp them around. This because behaving differently would mean behaving exactly like them. And the last thing I want is to behave like them. The crutch, here, is that once you embrace a principle, and you are proud about it, you are also bound to all the implications deriving from it. And some people just don't think to all the implications in advance.

Still with me? Good. You ask me "why I talk about some actor playing Hitler". I wrote it explicitly: if one condemns someone else because the latter wants to explore a dark side of the human being via a creative pursuit, the righteous condemner can be my guest. But I would then point out the implications of the principle he just bound himself to: What about an actor? A painter? A writer? Where does one trace the line?

[Of course, talking about the case in point, it could be objected that "Gang Rape" is one of those "pretentious swineish pursuits that justify their existence by being branded around as 'works of art'". If so, I would simply point out how no one came here to brand around anything - as we saw it was done without the author's permission (and, again, probably illegally).]

One could then simply state how his personal opinion is that "the line" is traced when the activity is labeled "as a game". Fine. I even agree with that. Still, this doesn't makes both of us "images of the world": i.e. what we think being right and wrong becomes "right and wrong in an absolute sense". This would be, again, forgespeak. It isn't that their experiences with traditional RPGs left them traumatized: no, they left traumatized the whole world. If you deny it then you are lying. Honest. Why? Because if they experienced so, then it is true in an absolute sense. They are thus speaking the obvious truth, which must then be applied by everybody.

I concluded my debate against the forgites on the Italian NG by stating: "Should the whole world - except three people - embrace The Forge, agree that those playing in different ways are child molesters, and condemn any other way of playing, those three people would still be entitled to the right to play D&D in the privacy of their homes with other consensual gamers, and to have fun from doing it". And I stand by same principle also here.

What a month :rant:

The difference between us and the Forgers, Reckall, is that we're right and they're wrong.

Because we're right and they're wrong, we can tell them how to play. Obviously.

The reason that the Forgers' way of play is wrong is that almost nobody wants to do it. In this, they are like the denizens of the Traveller Mailing List, or the Ars Magica Berkeley Mailing List, or most of the residents of Tangency Open on rpg.net - lonely basement-dwellers with no game groups, their only involvement in gaming in the last several years (up to 20 years in some cases) being arguing about pointless minutae on their mailing lists, and caressing their glossy books lovingly late at night.

A game's purpose in existence is to be played. If no-one will join you in playing it, the game is meaningless, and may as well not exist. Likewise, if no-one is interested in your playstyle and you never game, your opinion on gaming is meaningless.

A preference in games nobody wants to play, a playstyle nobody wants to share, makes you not a gamer. The Forgers wondering why nobody listens to them is like the guy writing to his MP saying, "I don't vote, but -" and then wondering why the MP read no further.

The Forgers are not wrong because their games or playstyles are nasty. They're wrong because they're irrelevant. Forgers are the emo niche of a subculture.

Gang Rape: the rpg is, it says, designed not to be fun, and therefore is not a game. It has no more relevance to gaming than a Men's Weekend away where we all get naked, bang on drums and wail in tears, "my father never loved me!" The use of our imaginations is part of gaming, but is not sufficient for gaming - especially when the only imaginative part is "in what way can we become more miserable?"

Forgers are not gamers. They are lonely wankers without game groups. Remember the founding essay of the Forger movement said that "Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated." As we now know, most people who try to game with Forgers become tired, bitter and frustrated.

That's why they hate us, because as stupid as many of our campaigns are, as adolescent and simple-minded as The Descent into the Deadly Dark Dangerous Demonic Deeps of the Dungeon of Devilish Denizens may be, we have FUN with our mates rolling dice and eating snacks.

While we have fun, the Forgers are left lonely in their basements, masturbating into their week-old socks with one hand while cutting themselves with the other, crying, "Tell me I'm supershockedgycool, mummy, tell me!"

All you need remember is that the Forger is the guy who got picked last for the team in school, even in Chess Club.

That's why they're wrong. And yes, the right to be wrong and fuck up is an essential part of democracy. But so is pointing and laughing. I mean, the leader of the Forgers is a professor of bat penises. This is the guy they rely on for profound insights into our hobby of pretending to be elven princesses while rolling dice and eating cheetos. A doctor of bat bollocks.

Now that's funny.

Quote from: Kyle AaronBut emos enjoy being scapegoats!

Quote from: shalvayez;351604By your understanding of their subculture, they do.

I'm sorry, are you an emo and I hurt your feelings?

Quote from: Reckall;351611David: I started talking about Freedom of Speech and Thought when, in this thread, those playing the game were explicitly lumped up with "holocaust deniers, gang rapists and animal torturers" - and then spoken about like if they actually did these things.

Reckall implying gamers who play Forge games are deviants is par for the course around these parts and is an example of freedom of speech in action. I disagree with kyle (and most posters here) when it comes to Forger games/gamers but I do think he's right when he says that they are irrelevent in the sense that a vast majority of gamers don't play their games. They seem to have some relevence here, though, because of the Swine War and all that.

I do get where you're coming from but you still have not put forward a convincing argument as to why you brought up freedom of speech. It seems clear to me (and I have been known to be wrong) that freedom of speech of any kind was not threatened here.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Reckall;351611Just to give an example of the depth of thought shown by OHT in this thread, a glance at my "location" shows in which timezone I live in, while a simple search on Wikipedia would have shown how Italians go to sleep like people do in all the rest of the world.

You can throw those dismissive stones of yours as much as you like, but it doesn't alter the fact that you're arguing about something that isn't relevant to what is being discussed.

You brought up freedom of speech in this thread. It's irrelevant. Everyone has been expressing it - the people who authored the game, and the people in this thread.